According to Wiki:Pigs can harbour a range of parasites and diseases that can be transmitted to humans. These include trichinosis, Taenia solium, cysticercosis, and brucellosis. Pigs are also known to host large concentrations of parasitic ascarid worms in their digestive tract.[14]

About thirty years ago when I was an on call claims adjuster, I got one truck accident where the driver took a turn off of Hwy. 141 onto I 35/80 and lost control, upsetting a tarp covered trailer full of 5 tons of dried hog's blood on the shoulder and embankment. We kept it out of a neighboring creek but ended up digging a pit and burying a lot of it.

zoom in and you can see where the creek behind the plant dumps into the river

WorldCitizen:Confabulat: It's pretty far from the plant to that creek, I wonder how they got the blood out there. Trucks? Pipeline?

Drainage pipe would be my guess from both that pic and the Google maps pic Winning linked.

Looks like they could be dumping with trucks with the very evident tire marks going straight from their parking/loading area to the creekbed. You can even see what looks like a concrete backstop so the truck doesn't go tumbling into the creek when they back it up in the dark (the likely time when illegal dumping occurs).

Good up til this point, FTA "It's also refreshing to see an aerial drone used to discover (and potentially choke) a river of blood, rather than creating one."

Sorry, but precision munitions and unmanned planes have done more to restrict bombing and killing to just target than any other invention. Before guided bombs and UAVs, not only were pilots at risk, but dropping dumb bombs caused death and destruction on an epic scale. Dresden anyone? Predators and the like have done more to keep innocents alive than anything else. Because of the advent of precision bombs in the 80s and 90s, and now UAVs, we no longer need fleets of B52s dropping millions of pounds of bombs on entire cities to destroy a few targets.

Is the creek on private property owned by the packing plant? If not then I see absolutely nothing illegal with what the drone pilot did. Even if it was on private property, if the police are flying about in a helicopter and happen to look down in someone's yard and see something illegal does that count as an illegal, warrant-less search?

jingks:This was on fark last year. Seems that minimum wage paid meat processing plant employees get lazy about keeping their waste out of the storm sewers.

Wrong. Seems their rich, greedy, douchenozzle bosses said we can't afford to pay for proper disposal because it would seriously cut into their Porsche money. Just chuck it in the river. No one will notice.

Also, this:

I've noticed that if you throw something into a water body, like a lake or an ocean, that the next day you come back and it's gone so, somehow it takes it away and filters it through and it just cleans it up, like a garbage compactor or whatever. So it's not really littering if you ask me.

Mock26:Even if it was on private property, if the police are flying about in a helicopter and happen to look down in someone's yard and see something illegal does that count as an illegal, warrant-less search?

As far as I know, no. Things that can be seen from publicly accessible airspace are in plain view.

WorldCitizen:Of course. If we had pure, unregulated market capitalism we wouldn't have this sort of thing. The Job Creators would not allow such bad things to happen to the people or environment.

Well, to be fair, it would be difficult for such large meat-packing plants to exist without regulatory bodies making things too expensive for small-timers. I mean, you're consolidating the production that used to be spread among thousands of small producers into one giant plant - all that blood has to go somewhere.

Last time I listened to the local news and traffic update, I think Friday, they were going on about a packing plant ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE OFFICES OF SOME POLITICIAN had refused to let said politician in for a site visit. This being after someone found pigs blood in the creek out back of the plant.

Now, this might sound ridiculous to most people, but blood meal has value. If the plant was DUMPING the product either their concentration system was broken of the bottom fell out of the market.

Overall, I gotta say that if the free market says it's not worth concentrating the blood for agricultural purposes we should subsidize it. It would be money better spent than cleaning up bodies of water.